Henry Adams, a historian-philosopher, was born into a prestigious family that included two U.S. presidents (his paternal grandfather John Quincey Adams and his great-grandfather John Adams). He won the Pulitzer-prize for his autobiography The Education of Henry Adams. It explores, in third-person, Adams' sense of alienation and obsolescence confronted with the chaotic forces of the modern world that became manifest in the "financial panic of 1893," but were still unapparent at this key moment of his youthful history recorded in Chapter V:
What Henry Adams said in his Class Oration of 1858 he soon forgot to the last word, nor had it the least value for education; but he naturally
remembered what was said of it.
He remembered especially one of his eminent uncles or relations remarking that, as the work of so young a man, the oration was singularly wanting in
enthusiasm.
The young man-- always in search of education-- asked himself whether, setting rhetoric aside, this absence of enthusiasm was a defect or a merit, since,
in either case, it was all that Harvard College taught, and all that the hundred young men, whom he was trying to represent, expressed. Another
comment threw more light on the effect of the college education. One of the elderly gentlemen noticed the orator’s “perfect self-possession.”
Self-possession indeed! . . .
Self-possession was the strongest part of Harvard College, which certainly taught men to stand alone, so that nothing seemed stranger to its graduates
than the paroxysms of terror before the public which often overcame the graduates of European universities. Whether this was, or was not, education, Henry
Adams never knew. He was ready to stand up before any audience in America or Europe, with nerves rather steadier for the excitement, but whether he should
ever have anything to say, remained to be proved. As yet he knew nothing.
Education had not begun.
Dome of the Administration Building,
Columbian Exposition, 1893.
(Architect: Richard Hunt)
Drifting in the dead-water of the fin-de-siecle--and during this last decade every one talked, and seemed to feel fin-de-siecle--where not a breath
stirred the idle air of education or fretted the mental torpor of self-content, one lived alone. Adams had long ceased going into society. . .
but a few houses always remained which he could enter without being asked, and quit without being noticed. One was John Hay's; another was Cabot Lodge's;
a third led to an intimacy which had the singular effect of educating him in knowledge of the very class of American politician who had done most to
block his intended path in life. Senator Cameron of Pennsylvania had married in 1880 a young niece of Senator John Sherman of Ohio, thus making an alliance
of dynastic importance in politics. . . and a dozen years of this intimacy had made him one of their habitual household. . . .
. . . In May the Senator took his family to Chicago to see the Exposition, and Adams went with them. Early in June, all sailed for England together, and
at last, in the middle of July, all found themselves in Switzerland, at Prangins, Chamounix, and Zermatt. On July 22 they drove across the Furka Pass and
went down by rail to Lucerne.
[. . . ]
. . . [A]fter talking silver all the morning with Senator Cameron on the top of their travelling-carriage crossing the Furka Pass, they reached Lucerne
in the afternoon, where Adams found letters from his brothers requesting his immediate return to Boston because the community was bankrupt and he
was probably a beggar.
[. . . ]
As a starting-point for a new education at fifty-five years old, the shock of finding one's self suspended, for several months, over the edge of bankruptcy,
without knowing how one got there, or how to get away, is to be strongly recommended. By slow degrees the situation dawned on him that the banks had lent
him, among others, some money — thousands of millions were — as bankruptcy — the same — for which he, among others, was responsible and of which he knew
no more than they. . . . To Adams the
situation seemed farcical, but the more he saw of it, the less he understood it. He was quite sure that nobody understood it much better. Blindly some
very powerful energy was at work, doing something that nobody wanted done. When Adams went to his bank to draw a hundred dollars of his own money on
deposit, the cashier refused to let him have more than fifty, and Adams accepted the fifty without complaint because he was himself refusing to let the
banks have some hundreds or thousands that belonged to them. Each wanted to help the other, yet both refused to pay their debts, and he could find no
answer to the question which was responsible for getting the other into the situation, since lenders and borrowers were the same interest and socially
the same person. Evidently the force was one; its operation was mechanical; its effect must be proportional to its power; but no one knew what it meant,
and most people dismissed it as an emotion — a panic — that meant nothing.
Men died like flies under the strain, and Boston grew suddenly old, haggard, and thin. Adams alone waxed fat and was happy, for at last he had got hold of
his world and could finish his education, interrupted for twenty years. He cared not whether it were worth finishing, if only it amused; but he seemed,
for the first time since 1870, to feel that something new and curious was about to happen to the world. Great changes had taken place since 1870 in the
forces at work; the old machine ran far behind its duty; somewhere — somehow — it was bound to break down, and if it happened to break precisely over
one's head, it gave the better chance for study.
[. . . ]
By the time he got back to Washington on September 19, the storm having partly blown over, life had taken on a new face, and one so interesting that
he set
off to Chicago to study the Exposition again, and stayed there a fortnight absorbed in it. He found matter of study to fill a hundred years, and his
education spread over chaos. Indeed, it seemed to him as though, this year, education went mad. The silver question, thorny as it was, fell into
relations as simple as words of one syllable, compared with the problems of credit and exchange that came to complicate it; and [w]hen one sought
rest at Chicago, educational game started like rabbits from every building, and ran out of sight among thousands of its kind before one could mark
its burrow. The Exposition itself defied philosophy. One might find fault till the last gate closed, one could still explain nothing that needed
explanation. As a scenic display, Paris had never approached it, but the inconceivable scenic display consisted in its being there at all -- more
surprising, as it was, than anything else on the continent, Niagara Falls, the Yellowstone Geysers, and the whole railway
system thrown in, since these were all natural products in their place; while, since Noah's Ark, no such Babel of loose and ill joined, such vague and
ill-defined and unrelated thoughts and half-thoughts and experimental outcries as the Exposition, had ever ruffled the surface of the Lakes.
The first astonishment became greater every day. That the Exposition should be a natural growth and product of the North west offered a step in evolution
to startle Darwin; but that it should be anything else seemed an idea more startling still; and even granting it were not -- admitting it to be a sort of
industrial, speculative growth and product of the Beaux Arts artistically induced to pass the summer on the shore of Lake Michigan -- could it be made to
seem at home there? Was the American made to seem at home in it? Honestly, he had the air of enjoying it as though it were all his own; he felt it was
good; he was proud of it; for the most part, he acted as though he had passed his life in landscape gardening and architectural decoration. If he had not
done it himself, he had known how to get it done to suit him, as he knew how to get his wives and daughters dressed at Worth's or Paquin's. Perhaps he
could not do it again; the next time he would want to do it himself and would show his own faults; but for the moment he seemed to have leaped directly
from Corinth and Syracuse and Venice, over the heads of London and New York, to impose classical standards on plastic Chicago. Critics had no tr[o]uble
in criticising the classicism, but all trading cities had always shown traders' taste, and, to the stern purist of religious faith, no art was thinner
than Venetian Gothic. All trader's taste smelt of bric-a-brac; Chicago tried at least to give her taste a look of unity.
One sat down to ponder on the steps beneath Richard Hunt's dome almost as deeply as on the steps of Ara Coeli, and much to the same purpose. Here was a
breach of continuity -- a rupture in historical sequence! Was it real, or only apparent? One's personal universe hung on the answer, for, if the rupture
was real and the
new American world could take this sharp and conscious twist towards ideals, one's personal friends would come in, at last, as winners in the great
American chariot-race for fame. If the people of the Northwest actually knew what was good when they saw it, they would some day talk about Hunt and
Richardson, La Farge and St. Gaudens, Burnham and McKim, and Stanford White when their politicians and millionaires were otherwise forgotten. The artists
and architects who had done the work offered little encouragement to hope it; they talked freely enough, but not in terms that one cared to quote; and to
them the Northwest refused to look artistic. They talked as though they worked only for themselves; as though art, to the Western people, was a stage
decoration; a diamond shirt-stud; a paper collar; but possibly the architects of Paestum and Girgenti had talked in the same way, and the Greek had said
the same thing of Semitic Carthage two thousand years ago.
Jostled by these hopes and doubts, one turned to the exhibits for help, and found it. The industrial schools tried to teach so much and so quickly that
the instruction ran to waste. Some millions of other people felt the same helplessness, but few of them were seeking education, and to them helplessness
seemed natural and normal, for they had grown up in the habit of thinking a steam engine or a dynamo as natural as the sun, and expected to understand
one as little as the other. For the historian alone the Exposition made a serious effort. Historical exhibits were common, but they never went far enough;
none were thoroughly worked out. One of the best was that of the Cunard steamers, but still a student hungry for results found himself obliged to waste a
pencil and several sheets of paper trying to calculate exactly when, according to the given increase of power, tonnage, and speed, the growth of the ocean
steamer would reach its limits. His figures brought him, he thought, to the year 1927; another generation to spare before force, space, and time should
meet. The ocean steamer ran the surest line of triangulation into the future, because it was the
nearest of man's products to a unity; railroads taught less because they seemed already finished except for mere increase in number; explosives taught
most, but needed a tribe of chemists, physicists, and mathematicians to explain; the dynamo taught least because it had barely reached infancy, and, if
its progress was to be constant at the rate of the last ten years, it would result in infinite costless energy within a generation. One lingered long among
the dynamos, for they were new, and they gave to history a new phase. Men of science could never understand the ignorance and naivete of the historian,
who, when he came suddenly on a new power, asked naturally what it was; did it pull or did it push? Was it a screw or thrust? Did it flow or vibrate? Was
it a wire or a mathematical line? And a score of such questions to which he expected answers and was astonished to get none.
Education ran riot at Chicago, at least for retarded minds which had never faced in concrete form so many matters of which they were ignorant. Men who
knew
nothing whatever -- who had never run a steam-engine, the simplest of forces -- who had never put their hands on a lever -- had never touched an electric
battery -- never talked through a telephone, and had not the shadow of a notion what amount of force was meant by a watt or an ampere or an erg, or any
other term of measurement introduced within a hundred years -- had no choice but to sit down on the steps and brood as they had never brooded on the
benches of Harvard College, either as student or professor, aghast at what they had said and done in all these years, and still more ashamed of the
childlike ignorance and babbling futility of the society that let them say and do it. The historical mind can think only in historical processes, and
probably this was the first time since historians existed, that any of them had sat down helpless before a mechanical sequence. Before a metaphysical or
a theological or a political sequence, most historians had felt helpless, but the single clue to which they had hitherto trusted was the unity of natural
force.
Did he himself quite know what he meant? Certainly not! If he had known enough to state his problem, his education would have been complete at once.
Chicago asked in 1893 for the first time the question whether the American people knew where they were driving. Adams answered, for one, that he did not
know, but would try to find out. On reflecting sufficiently deeply, under the shadow of Richard Hunt's architecture, he decided that the American people
probably knew no more than he did; but that they might still be driving or drifting unconsciously to some point in thought, as their solar system was said
to be drifting towards some point in space; and that, possibly, if relations enough could be observed, this point might be fixed. Chicago was the first
expression of American thought as a unity; one must start there.
Washington was the second. When he got back there, he fell headlong into the extra session of Congress called to repeal the Silver Act. . . . The struggle
was rather less irritable than such struggles generally were, and it ended like a comedy. On the evening of the final vote, Senator Cameron came back from
the Capitol with Senator Brice, Senator Jones, Senator Lodge, and Moreton Frewen, all in the gayest of humors as though they were rid of a heavy
responsibility. Adams, too, in a bystander's spirit, felt light in mind. He had stood up for his eighteenth century, his Constitution of 1789, his George
Washington, his Harvard College, his Quincy, and his Plymouth Pilgrims, as long as any one would stand up with him. He had said it was hopeless twenty
years before, but he had kept on, in the same old attitude, by habit and taste, until he found himself altogether alone. He had hugged his antiquated
dislike of bankers and
capitalistic society until he had become little better than a crank. He had known for years that he must accept the regime, but he had known a great many
other disagreeable certainties -- like age, senility, and death -- against which one made what little resistance one could. The matter was settled at last
by the people. For a hundred years, between 1793 and 1893, the American people had hesitated, vacillated, swayed forward and back, between two forces, one
simply industrial, the other capitalistic, centralizing, and mechanical. In 1893, the issue came on the single gold standard and the majority at last
declared itself, once for all, in favor of the capitalistic system with all its necessary machinery. . . . A capitalistic system had been adopted, and
if it were to be run at all, it must be run by capital and by capitalistic methods; for nothing could surpass the nonsensity of trying to run so complex
and so concentrated a machine by Southern and Western farmers in grotesque alliance with city day-laborers, as had been tried in 1800 and 1828, and had
failed even under simple conditions.
. . . Such great revolutions commonly leave some bitterness behind, but nothing in politics ever surprised Henry Adams more than the ease with which he and
his silver friends slipped across the chasm, and alighted on the single gold standard and the capitalistic system with its methods; the protective tariff;
the corporations and trusts; the trades-unions and socialistic paternalism which necessarily made
their complement; the whole mechanical consolidation of force, which ruthlessly stamped out the life of the class into which Adams was born, but created
monopolies capable of controlling the new energies that America adored.
Society rested, after sweeping into the ash-heap these cinders of a misdirected education. After this vigorous impulse, nothing remained for a historian
but to ask -- how long and how far!
Source: from Henry Adams' The Education of Henry Adams, Chapter 22. "Chicago (1893)": https://www.bartleby.com/159/22.html
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Posted: 4-15-15; Updated: 4-1-19
